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Friday, October 24, 2014

NOTE: I have a very strong opinion about this subject because I’m dealing with it in life right now. But, I don’t expect everyone else to view this problem as strongly as I do. I feel it is important voice this issues as strongly as I can. But you don’t have to agree. All I’m doing is sharing mine.
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This is a brilliant project! It a strong statement and doesn’t sugar coat the issues. This issues is becoming dangerous for everyone, not just 20somethings young woman who have an opinion, but anyone who have a woman in their life. Take the recent report from Utah State University. A young woman, smart and strong, while doing her job is threat to be murdered and anyone else that’s near her will die too. Imagine your mother or daughter doing their job, which can be doing the dishes, and some man threatening to kill them for doing the dishes and anyone that dirtied a plate. That stupid, right?! Will that’s what’s happening. I hate this word but we can’t be sweet and nice about this anymore. We have to use the ‘shock factor’, we have to be blunt. We have to focus you to see that this issues is affecting your future and the lives of future woman, and sometime to make that happen we have to ask you to imagine your wife/mother/daughter as the victim.

Parents might statement that this will corrupt these children and therefore theirs. Yet children are already corrupted, they watch tv/movies, they read, they have friends, their corrupted. At least corrupt them with positive messages and a bright future where anyone can be happy and successful no matter their gender.
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Children don’t need to be shocked, but their parents do. Adult (parents) have to do something to stop the abuse of woman, gays, minorities. Just because they don’t watch TV doesn’t mean their not being focus feed gender roles.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Surfing Facebook and stubbled onto my BFA school page to find this quote,

"After the jump you will find code for Google Glass disrupting software glasshole.sh. Kick google glass off any wifi network in the vicinity. apparently an even more aggressive version is in the works."

In short this few lines of code can jam the Google Glass and making it unusable. Not cool in my book, so I felt like replying since over the last year I've been working in and research about the rise of wearable technology and it's future.

This is what I wrote in responses to the above quote;

I'm only been in this field of "wearable tech" for a year, and am by not means an expert, yet. But what I do know is that wearables are HOT and developers and companies are trying hard to get the next cool wearable out there as fast as they can. This effects thinking about the finer details of what is public and private. Jamming a network is not the answer. Who says that someone on a crowded subway, where everyone has their cellphones/ipads out, isn't taking your photo or video you without you knowing? Are you going to jam/block there cells too? What should be happening, and in some case is happening, is that we start developing more responsibly. That's where we come in, creative technologist, we take sdks and instead of jamming/block system we create an app that when it recognizes face it ask if it can take your picture, and you say "Yes, Glass take my picture."

Monday, February 3, 2014

In Her, a Silicon Valley type Los Angeles is engulfed in a soft orange smog that floats around the tops of all the constant growing skyscrapers. In this worlds the clean saturated colors, the identical male trousers, shirts, sweaters, the very modest Donna Reed styles female clothing configurations this place and the people living here. There is a noticeable lack of people in public spaces. This worlds relationship with technology is totally deficiency with their human relationships. It is just accepted to talk to yourself and have a relationship with you OS. The user validate this relationships by the algorithm of emotion the OS provides at first without any consequences, as opposed to a relationship with a human. You see the user go through the ups and downs of human interaction and the drama it causes, and it’s countered by the generated responses of the OS. That is, until the user becomes outdated and users have to resort back to human connections in order to continue their life.

I found this film to be a clever, pretension, entertaining, funny conversation of how to use technology responsibly. The quick social acceptance of OS relationships, the classicism of only the well-off can afford the life that a OS can provide, and the excessive value of someone that can express human emotion. In some ways, I feel this film had the same message as the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In Kubrick’s film it was all about the relationship between humans and mysterious black, outer space, in “Her” it was the developing bond between humans and a device/system.

** I need to finish filling in some blank here but you get my point, sorta? **

Thursday, June 6, 2013

So this past semester I worked with nitinol wire. Nitinol wire or muscle wire, in simple terms, is a wire that uses electric current to create a shapes. There's much more this fancy wire can do, but for now I'll show you how I used it.

Here's the link to my final project for Fashionable Technology. You can see how I used it to simulate life/something growing in my final piece. It didn't come out as awesome as I wanted it to but it works for now.

You will need a piece of wood or heavy paper, nothing conductive. You will need to solder down the transistor to the copper tape... I recommend soldering all the components down to the copper tape, but test the circuit before doing so. Sometimes things don't work right because somethings has burnt up or the copper tape isn't touch right.

The circuit all hooked up.

The red and black gator mouth clamps connect to a 9volt battery. Remember + to - using different colors clamps helps.

The finish circuit hooked up to nitinol wire and a battery.

The white and yellow clamps are hooked up to nitinol wire, the red and black the battery and the other white and green are connected to an Arduino Uno. The Arduino part is simple. Buy a starter kit for an Arduino then download the open source Arduino software. Once installed open a new project and then go to example and open up the Blink sketch. This is the one you'll use to get started. Plug in a LED to the ground (GRD)/13 pin, a green wire to the 8 pin and another white to ground (GRD). Clamp the other white wire to GRD and the green clamp to the pin. {{ I hope that's not to confusing? }} Check the sketch for an mistakes (sometime you have to change the USB port) then load the sketch to the Arduino.

Disregard the yellow wires.

What should happen is that the LED will blink and the nitinol wire will become straight and active. When the LED is not lite the wire returns to it original state.

Friday, February 15, 2013

I've done nothing but be craft today (2-3-13). I should have been doing homework but my new laptop has been a major distractions. Yes! I have a new laptop! Hurray! My new one is 13" but since my old laptop was a 15" I needed a new sleeve. Semi problem. This year I'm doing this new thing of taking something old and making something new. This is what I did to solve that problem of the laptop sleeve.

Friday, December 21, 2012

This semester for my final assignment I examine the social application and the sustainability effects of my project CommonWaste, a social recycling network. For CommonWaste’s I looked into social environment expectations, technical function and operation, and other applications for the project. Because people don't see the effect of recycling quickly enough to understand its importance, showing them the effect through a virtual representation of the real world will create a new incentive.

The tools!

This project came from an idea that I presented in class at the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester. The assignment was to take something physical and mash it with something digital. I took the idea of recycling and transferring the effect to a social network. You affect the CommonWaste network through your actions in the real world

Getting ready to install the sensor.

Installing the plastic flap.

The finished install.

The sensor!

The general idea for the mash up assignment was to create a social environment where your recycling made an impact in a digital world that mirrored your own. Coming from rural New Mexico, the positive effects of recycling were seen almost on a daily base. In the coffee shop I worked at we used eco-friendly cups, plates, etc., and most, if not all, of our customers recycled the cups or used them again later or the next day. Being here in New York, I see recycling signs and bins everywhere, but I don’t see the effect so much. I still see trash everywhere. I wanted to try and use the tenants in our apartment building as a part of a social experiment—since I presented this assignment to my class I have changed the location of the project to D12 (Parsons), the graduate student lab —to see if they would be more excited about recycling their trash than getting a tweet. Or, if they saw how much their recycling effected a social environment, would it make them more interested in their own? This is still a vague concept, and my thoughts are all over the place, but the bottom line would be to create a recycle bin, then showcasing (in a digital format or social network) how the person recycling affects their digital world (and by extension, how it could affect the real world). Installing the bin in the physical environment would help keep community accountable and in return keep D12 clean.

To create CommonWaste I hatched out several options and methods. I researched local and national waste management programs that dealt with the community and utilize social media, and added them to support my project’s concept. The following are the steps I took:

- Visualizing the virtual environment (Figure 6.);

- Surveying the importance of recycling and whether or not adding a social element would make a difference;

- Prototyping a functional sensor switch (Figure 7.) that would demonstrate how the action of recycling would affect the virtual world.

Installing the sensor and breadboard.

The bin!

Wiring!

Lighting up the LEDs.

CommonWaste became more of a project in development. It seems that there is a need for a new type of recycling method and this might be the birth of one. For the future continuation of this project, I would like to create different bins to add to the system where the items you recycle have a related effect. For example, recycling paper and cardboard would affect trees and plants. Recycling glass would develop solar panels on the virtual windows. And compost and recycled electronic parts would have an effected place in the digital world. The social world would be shared as you are more active with others and the more your environment changes. A type of trophy system would be developed to show your growth as a real life recycler. In the end, my hope is simply that this project would have a positive effect on the environment.

Presenting the CommonWaste!

This project needs more development and thought, but it's getting there. I believe it might have a future somewhere down the road. Thank you for a great first semester and all the helpful feedback.